Baker fellow helps prepare for White House transition

Baker
fellow helps prepare for White House transition
…………………………………………………………………

BY
B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff

The White House
is no place for on-the-job training, but traditionally a
number of presidential appointees have had to learn their
jobs with few or no guidelines or instructions, according
to Terry Sullivan, a fellow at Rice’s James A. Baker
III Institute for Public Policy.

As associate
director of the White House 2001 Project, Sullivan has spent
the past two years trying to change that. He and Martha
Joynt Kumar of Towson University interviewed more than 80
current or former White House staff members from the last
six administrations to find out how they did their jobs
and what they wish they had known before day one. The White
House 2001 Project team produced seven notebooks, each containing
about 600 pages of information to assist the new administration.

“Unlike
corporations, a White House begins without a record compiled
by its previous occupants,” Sullivan said. “The
goal of the White House Interview Program is to smooth the
path to power by furnishing incoming staff with substantive
information about the operation of seven White House offices
critical to an effective beginning.”

The program
focused on the offices of the chief of staff, staff secretary,
press, communications, counsel to the president, management
and administration and presidential personnel. The role
of each office was defined, and supportive tools, such as
telephone contacts, were gathered for the newcomers. The
interviewees were asked about how to do — and how not
to do — their jobs so their successors could benefit
from lessons they learned from experience.

“Many of
those we interviewed told us they had to start their jobs
without any organizational charts, descriptions of their
responsibilities or ‘how to’ instructions,”
Sullivan said. “From these interviews, we were able
to compile such essential information for the incoming administration.”

The White House
2001 Project also should help smooth the way for those outside
the White House office, Sullivan said.

He noted that
more than 6,700 jobs in the executive branch of the federal
government are filled by appointees, and only about 285
of these are in the executive office of the president.

Most appointees
have to answer questionnaires for background checks from
various divisions of government, and often the same questions
show up. To eliminate the inconvenience of providing duplicate
information on multiple forms, the White House 2001 Project
also developed software for nomination forms that can be
filled out online.

“This should
help avoid wasting time, make the information more easily
accessible and speed up the review process for new appointees,”
Sullivan said.

Because of the
large number of positions that have to be filled, the new
presidential administration is not likely to be fully staffed
until the middle of its second year of office, Sullivan
said. But with the information he has compiled, at least
many of those new workers will know what to expect of their
jobs and be better prepared to take on their new responsibilities.

“Our interviewees
said it would have been nice to read about how to do their
jobs before the actual job responsibility hit them,”
Sullivan said. “Without the introductory material and
job guidelines, it was like trying to sip water from a fire
hose.”

In the 75 days
between the Nov. 7 election and the inauguration Jan. 20,
the new president needs to form a White House team, designate
14 Cabinet secretaries, prepare the inaugural address and
an agenda for the nation and send to Congress a budget exceeding
$1 trillion. Because of the delay in determining the new
president this year, George W. Bush lost a significant portion
of the standard transition time.

Sullivan hopes
the information from the White House 2001 Project will help
minimize the impact of that lost time.

“Early
planning is associated with an effective first year in office,”
he said. “In a setting where those coming into office
can anticipate vacant offices and empty desk drawers, their
planning must be completed and their decision-making processes
must be in place well before they enter the White House.”

The White House
2001 Project was funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable
Trusts and support from the Baker Institute at Rice. George
Edwards III from Texas A&M University and James Pfiffner
from George Mason University assisted Sullivan and Kumar,
who was project director.

For more information
about the project, visit the Web site at <http://whitehouse2001.org>.